Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Inner Separation
To create an inner gap between awareness and a negative emotion or mechanical reaction by inwardly affirming ‘this is not I’ — refusing to identify with the state and declining to feed it.
Inner separation in 4 lines: When a negative emotion grips you, notice you are saying “This is I” to it. Make the inner act of “this is not I” — feel the small gap between the awareness and the state. Then don’t feed it: no rehearsing, no justifying, no making accounts. You have the right to refuse a negative emotion; refusing to identify and refusing to fuel it starves it.
What it is
Maurice Nicoll’s most practical and characteristic instruction is inner separation: in the grip of a negative emotion — resentment, self-pity, irritation, anxious considering — you make a deliberate inner act of standing apart from it by affirming, in effect, “this is not I.” Nicoll taught that we habitually say “This is I” to every passing mood and mechanical reaction, and so we are them; the whole acquired False Personality — “this artificial figure that life has built up” — claims each negative state as its own.
Inner separation reverses that. He wrote that “inner separation means some awareness that one is not the same as one’s acquired Personality, with all its acquired prides and buffers.” Crucially, Nicoll insisted we have a right to refuse negative emotions — they are not obligatory, however justified they feel — and that refusing to identify with one and refusing to feed it starves it.
It operationalises the deeper Self that is not the passing state (All Is One) and a withdrawal of identifying attention (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
From Nicoll’s Commentaries:
- Notice you are caught in a negative state. First you must observe it (see the companion self-observation practice). The state announces itself as “This is I, this is how things are, and I’m right to feel it.” 2. Make the inner act of separation. Instead of “This is I,” inwardly take the position “this is not I.” Nicoll: “To remember oneself in the Personality would be to strengthen it — to say ‘This is I’ to it instead of ‘This is not I’.” You are not pretending the feeling is absent; you are declining to be it.
- Sense the gap. Inner separation is “some awareness that one is not the same as one’s acquired Personality, with all its acquired prides and buffers.” Feel the small distance between the awareness that observes and the state being observed.
- Refuse to feed it. Nicoll warned the state will recruit reinforcements: “if you do nothing, the negative emotion will call to itself other negative emotions.” Inner separation includes not supplying it with fresh fuel — not rehearsing the grievance, not justifying it, not “making accounts.” He spoke of starving negative states rather than expressing or indulging them.
- Claim the right to refuse. Nicoll’s distinctive moral note: you are entitled to decline a negative emotion. It feels compulsory and self-evidently justified; that feeling is the False Personality’s claim, not a fact. Seeing this loosens its grip.
- Return, lightly, as often as needed. You will re-identify within seconds. The re-noticing and the renewed “this is not I” is the practice; it is not a one-shot victory. (Sourcing note: “this artificial figure that life has built up,” “inner separation means some awareness that one is not the same as one’s acquired Personality, with all its acquired prides and buffers,” “to say ‘This is I’ to it instead of ‘This is not I’,” and “the negative emotion will call to itself other negative emotions” are attributed to Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries; cited from quotation collections of the work, wording per those sources. The phrase “starving negative states” is Nicoll’s.)
Source & Lineage
The teaching is Maurice Nicoll’s, in his Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (1952-56), developing the Work of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.
It rests on the Fourth Way model of multiplicity (the “many I’s”), the acquired False Personality versus Essence, and the doctrine that negative emotions are mechanical and unnecessary — a state we are not obliged to obey.
Nicoll’s own contribution is the crisp, usable formulation “this is not I” and the framing of inner separation as both a right and a discipline of not feeding the state. (The “many I’s,” False Personality, and “negative emotions are unnecessary” are the tradition’s framework, presented as its teaching, not as settled psychology.).
Common refinements
Mistaking separation for suppression. “This is not I” is not “this isn’t happening.” You acknowledge the feeling fully and decline to be run by it. Pretending it’s gone is bypass, not separation (see safety).
- Using it to dodge real signals. Grief, fear of genuine danger, anger at real injustice carry information. The target is mechanical, self-feeding negativity — resentment, self-pity, considering — not every difficult emotion.
- Trying to force it down. You cannot out-muscle a state; force is usually a fresh identification. You only notice, separate, and decline to feed.
- Refinement: Pair the inner words with the non-feeding act — the instant you say “this is not I,” also stop the rehearsal: no replaying the slight, no building the case. Separation plus starvation is far stronger than the phrase alone.